


Sophomoric

by lightningwaltz



Category: Fangirl - Rainbow Rowell
Genre: Epistolary, F/M, Gen, Metafiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-16 16:01:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16957083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightningwaltz/pseuds/lightningwaltz
Summary: Magicath! So exciting that you’re here! Are you going to do Yuletide this year? You really should. Signups close in a few days!-AO3 comment, October 2012Or: Cath signs up for Yuletide





	Sophomoric

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NaomiK](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NaomiK/gifts).



> Hi NaomiK! So I freaking loved the idea of Cath doing Yuletide and I loved writing this fic. This ended up turning into less of a fic about Cath writing for Yuletide and more about Cath signing up for Yuletide... Solely because over the past decade October has come to mean two things for me:
> 
> 1\. Halloween  
> 2\. All the anticipation surrounding Yuletide assignments. 
> 
> I think Cath would also be prone to getting super invested/nervous/excited about it, just based on how serious she is about fandom in Fangirl. However, it was also interesting to explore her investing more energy in fandoms outside of Simon Snow, now that Simon Snow is a closed fandom in her world. 
> 
> Also, since her sophomore year would be in 2012... It was kind of fun to look back at the state of fandom in 2012. I ended up looking at the list of signups, thinking about what music tended to be put on fanmixes, how fics were being titled. It became a real To All The Prompts I Loved Before kind of experience. Everything in here is written out of love for the whole experience (for that year, but also just for Yuletide in particular.) 
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

Magicath! So exciting that you’re here! Are you going to do Yuletide this year? You really should. Signups close in a few days!  
-AO3 comment, October 2012

*

That was, indeed, the comment that sparked Cath’s first Yuletide misadventure.

A few weekends before, she’d imported all her fic over to AO3. This was a step she had been procrastinating on since her eighteenth birthday. Some of that was due to inertia, and some of it was due to a (probably pointless) loyalty to her roots. Yes, it was true that FanFixx.net was nicknamed the “pit of voles.” And, yes, it was the site where most fanfic writers got their first start. 

But it was also the site where most fanfic writers _got their first start._

There was a kind of comfort in the resolute ugliness of the site. The blue font on a blindingly white and gray background was a cozy eyesore. Cath and Wren had spent a lot of Friday nights eating way too many barbecue chips, drinking way too much Dr Pepper, and spending way too much time laughing at Simon Snow self-insert fics. All of them seemed to involve wacky teenagers letting penguins loose in The Mage’s office, and the rote goofiness of it all allowed for a strange kind of emotional catharsis. (Why was it always _penguins_?)

At the same time, Cath wasn’t exactly unaware of the status of fandoms online. Livejournal was a ghost town, fan shrines felt like capsules to the late 90s, Tumblr wasn’t a great medium for writing fic, and one of her more _mature_ fics had been flagged and taken down from FanFixx.net back in August. (Oddly, the banned story was one that did a fade to blank well before sex happened. Her most explicit fic- Cath’s one venture into writing for a Simon Snow kink meme- was still on the site.)

AO3 seemed like the logical next step. It had been strangely thrilling to copy paste the new user code, set everything up, and import all her fic over. There was even something miraculous about seeing _Carry On, Simon_ free of comments, kudos, or views. The whole experience was a little like witnessing the first snowfall of the season. Cath even took a print-screen capture of it before feeling sheepish and deleting the image. 

The comments came in almost immediately, beginning with a few welcoming messages. _‘Wow, you’re finally here!’_ and _‘So glad I can finally give you kudos!’_ These quickly evened out to the standard compliments and questions about the fic itself. Requests for a sequel still continued, just like on FanFixx.net. She was soothed by the familiarity of it all. 

And then Cath was asked about Yuletide. 

This was not the first time this had happened. It had become its own tradition. Fall had always ushered in brightly colored foliage and questions about Yuletide. For a few years she’d been too young. And last year she’d been … too much of a _freshman_. 

Cath ran the calculations in her head. This year sign-ups seemed to be happening a bit later than usual, actually. The autumn leaves were already brown and crunchy on the campus’s walkways. The air was already adamantly cold. And Cath had already completed all of her midterms. _That_ last thing was the sticking point. Crossing that major academic hurdle had her floating on an adrenaline high. Finals still felt rather far away. (Unlike the previous year she had already made a decent amount of progress on her last project for Creative Writing.) 

Maybe this was possible.

Cath clicked the sign-up button. Cath immediately clicked out of the tab. Then she clicked her way back to the same page. 

She repeated the same process with the tag set. 

There were just so many _things_. Things to fill in, drop down options to select, auto-selections to get right. At least the FAQ managed to assuage her fears. After looking at the timeline, she realized she had a few days to decide on what fandoms to request, and which fandoms to offer. After taking one look at the tag set, Cath immediately knew she wouldn’t be able to decide anything in just a few hours. She probably couldn’t decide this over an entire _weekend_. 

A year ago this might have defeated her. Instead, Cath gritted her teeth, put in a few placeholders for both categories, and hit submit. She was immediately informed- in bright red font, to boot- that she hadn’t offered enough characters for any of her fandoms. Cath clicked some names at random and hit send. 

This time it went through.

*

Hello Yuletide writer, 

This is my first time doing Yuletide and I’m really excited. I’ve spent the last few years obsessing over the Simon Snow series, but I enjoy a lot of other fandoms too! It’ll be great to read a fic for one of my other beloved fandoms, and I’m sure I’ll like anything you write for me! After all, we already have a rare fandom in common, right? 

I like snarky dialogue, tearful confessions, road trips, redemption narratives, fake dating, and pining. Explicit fic is great, but not mandatory at all! Emotional connections are what tend to get to me, so it’s fine if the fic only require really dramatic hand-holding or something. 

As for my DNWs, I guess my biggest one is actually protagonist-centered morality. It’s totally fine for a character to be the hero of the story, just don’t demonize the anti-heroes. 

Also no watersports. 

Fandoms:  
[Fill this in later, Cath!]  
-YuletideLetter2012Aaaaaaaagh.doc, recovered October 2012

*

_I enjoy a lot of other fandoms too!_

Cath clicked the cap on and off of her highlighter. For days, now, she had been vaguely haunted by that perky disclaimer in her Yuletide letter. _Did_ she have a lot of fandoms? College had sapped her of her energy to read. She went to movies with Reagan or Wren, sometimes, and she and Levi watched TV shows together. 

She was definitely in _fandom_. That is, she was in fandom in the sense that she liked curating sparkly fandom things on her social media sites. She’d reblogged countless pretty gif sets from Game of Thrones (not Yuletide eligible). She’d downloaded so many fanmixes for Doctor Who (not Yuletide eligible) that she’d infected her computer with malware over the summer. She didn't love Simon Snow any less, nor did she feel less of an attachment to Carry On. It was just that Simon Snow being a closed fandom meant she had a little bit more room in her heart for other things.

_I enjoy a lot of other fandoms too!_

She really did. And that might prove to be a problem. 

Cath’s phone was set to silent. That didn’t stop it from vibrating on her desk until it almost fell onto the floor. 

“Hey,” Wren said after Cath picked up. Just that one word, before she came to a hard stop. 

“Hey, what’s up?” 

“Did you really sign up for Yuletide because-” 

“What the _hell_?” Cath tried to remember if she had texted Wren about it. “How did you know about that?” 

“Oh, uh…” Wren stopped speaking, but this time it clearly wasn’t out of politeness. “The Simon Snark forums.” 

“ _Wren_ ,” Cath groaned. 

She was half appalled, half amazed at the nostalgia of it all. Three years ago they’d stumbled across the Simon Snark forums. Cath’s fics (and the supposed lack of merit thereof) had been a hot topic of discussion at the time. Wren had signed up for the forums, fought ferociously to restore Cath’s honor, and proceeded to convince most of the users that she _was_ Cath. 

That had been a very interesting summer. 

“Why did you go back there?” For Cath, the forums were a little like a mosquito bite. Their existence stung, for sure, but they were surprisingly easy to ignore if she ignored the temptation to scratch that itch. She was hardly the only thing they talked about, anyway.

“… I have to write a response paper about an Adorno reading. What was I supposed to do? _Not_ procrastinate?” 

“That sounds fair.” Probably. Wren claimed to have fallen in love with sociology in their freshman spring semester. She also claimed to hate ninety percent of the readings she had to do for it. “Did you fight anyone?”

“ _No_ , Cath. I just read, like, once a year now. Anyway they’re mostly wondering what you’re going to offer to write. Do you know?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Liar.”

“I’m hanging up now.” 

“Hold on, can I just say I’m glad you’re moving on from FanFixx.net?”

“It wasn’t that bad there. People haven’t put author’s notes in the middle of a fic in years.”

*

So Magicath signed up for Yuletide  
oh god did she really  
I can see her name in the participants list, so yeah.. Unless someone is plagiarizing her on ao3 again.  
I’m curious to see if she can actually write for a different fandom. Is that a bad thing?  
UGH, why even bother signing up this year? She’s going to win Yuletide.  
Yeah, she’s going to get all the attention.  
Guys there’s an anonymous period for a reason. She won’t “win” Yuletide when winning actually matters.  
Spoiler alert: “Winning Yuletide” is a stupid concept.  
But still! Eventually reveals will happen and she’ll get all the kudos!  
Yeah and she’s only ever written for Simon Snow. She’ll probably go for a Yuletide popular fandom and get a shit ton of attention even before reveals.  
Which is the most popular fandom right now? Elementary?  
Fairy Tales is leading like it always does.  
can you really see fucking magicath writing some kind of edgy fic for fairy tales or greek myths because I can’t lmao  
So then it’s probably going to be Elementary.  
According to tags on tumblr she’s way behind on the show because of college. I don’t think she’ll sign up to write that one.  
Am I the only one not bothered by her signing up?  
Yeah, you are the ONLY one in the entire world.  
Hi Magicath!  
-Comments from the Simon Snark forum, October 2012  
*

Cath ended up explaining her Yuletide problem to Levi one morning as they made breakfast. Most of his roommates were already out for the day, but one of them was blasting The National a floor above. Cath felt the songs more than she heard them; a slow rumbling that seeped through the ceiling as she gulped one too many cups of coffee.

“There’s just so _many_ things to choose between,” Cath said. Her heart was trembling in its ribcage, sending out frantic pulses to all the different corners of her body. _Wake up, wake up, wake up._

“Well, you’re not much of a Star Wars fan, right? So that’s one fandom ruled out, right?” 

One of Cath’s earliest memories involved seeing the re-release of the first trilogy in theaters. With her mother. “Not enough to write for it. Or ask for it.”

“So that’s one fandom ruled out, right?”

“Yes and no? It’s too big of a fandom. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a million fics out there for that. Remember, this can only be fandoms with less than a thousand fic.”

“Okay. Harry Potter?”

Cath just smiled. It was easy to imagine the comments on the Simon Snark forums if she did that. _‘lollll she wrote for that Simon Snow knockoff series. She’s such a hack.’_

__“Still too many fics out there.”_ _

__“Jesus Christ.”_ _

__“…. Lots of fic for him, too. Haven’t you ever seen the Inspirational Fiction section of Barnes & Noble?”_ _

__That made Levi laugh more than the joke was worth, but something about the sound smoothed out the staccato rhythm of her caffeine-drugged pulse._ _

__The two of them ended up poring over the tag set while they ate eggs and toast. They soon got stuck in the “Other Media” category._ _

__“Home for the Holidays commercial? People want fic for a commercial?”_ _

__Cath hesitated for a long moment. He’d already seen her naked (about half a dozen times by now) but this was revealing in a whole new way._ _

__“They do… if they want to read about incest.”_ _

__“Incest?”_ _

__Cath sighed, clicked over to Youtube, and found the commercial in question._ _

__“Oh. Yeah. Yeah that sure is… Huh.”_ _

__“… Yeah.”_ _

____

*

Offer:  
\+ fairy tales (hah!)  
\+ greek mythology (hah!!)  
\+ elementary (hah!!!)  
\+ no but seriously what do I want to write???? 

Request:  
\+ ??  
+what DO I like???  
-YuletidePossibilities2012.txt

*

In the end, signing up for Yuletide was a little like working on any other assignment. Namely, she had to take notes and filter everything down to the most important information. She went tag by tag, fandom by fandom. She opened up a Notepad document and created two categories in it: every fandom she felt comfortable offering, and every fandom that she might want to request.

Eventually Reagan noticed. And, like Levi, she had questions. And opinions.

“So it’s like fanfic as _homework_? For fandoms no one cares about?”

“It’s not graded or anything. I mean not really?” Cath didn’t know how to explain kudos to Reagan. “And you get a gift fic in return. So it’s more like a gift exchange. Also people _do_ care about these fandoms. That’s why this exchange exists.” 

“Let me guess, you’re going to write about Greek myth or something.” 

“Huh?” This again? Although, at least her roommate had more faith in her than the average user of the Simon Snark forums.

“I’m just saying I had to read the Iliad for that Freshman writing seminar, right? And Achilles and his friend were super gay. It’s right up your alley.” 

“Maybe.”

“Okay, now I’m imagining gay vampire Achilles. That would actually be kind of fun. Is _this_ why people write fic? God, I hate that I’m wondering about this. And stop laughing so much!”

*

Reagan told me you’re gonna request gay vampire Achilles for Yuletide 

I think Reagan wants to request that for Yuletide. 

Throw in a request for The Outsiders from me 

…. I was actually already thinking about doing that  
-Text messages between Levi Stewart and Cath Avery

*

A fic comment had inspired her to sign-up for Yuletide, but Levi’s text message helped Cath narrow her focus. He had probably been joking but she realized she did kind of want fic about _The Outsiders_. A lot. Ponyboy and Johnny _literally_ ran away together in the book. Ponyboy had been prone to quoting bittersweet poetry, and Johnny would clearly move heaven and earth for Ponyboy.

It was the kind of novel that screamed out for fix-it fic. Or maybe a tragic fic that compounded all of the canon''s misery. 

Once Cath had decided on one requested fandom, a few others fell into place. A Disney movie here, an Elementary request there. Overall, this part was more fun than she had expected. But deciding what to _offer_ was when Cath truly fell for Yuletide. 

The tag set was downright intimidating. You could even call it inhospitable. The letters, by comparison, were warm and welcoming. Cath ended up clicking on everything that listed a fandom she knew (and even some letters that didn’t.) She read requests for ships that were teased but never realized in canon. Characters that appeared in one episode, movie, or tale… and then never again. People wanted different POVs. They wanted prequels, sequels, and midquels. They wanted the same characters making slightly different choices. They wanted the same characters in entirely different universes.

The requests were as varied as the participants, but the same basic need underpinned everything: _we love this story, we want more of it._

And through it all, Cath was reminded what had drawn her to writing fanfic in the first place. Yes, the obvious chemistry between Simon and Baz had compelled her to write. But the Simon Snow series wasn’t the first time (or the only time) that she wondered _what happened next._ What did that character do when he was off the page? What would she have done if she hadn’t died? She thought about these things when watching old movies or new TV shows. She’d wondered things like this about all her assigned readings over the years. 

Evidently, she had not been alone in this. It was one thing to tell herself this. It was another thing to see it in action.

_*_

**Fandom:** Candle Cove  
PLEASE READ THIS IF YOU HAVEN’T: http://ichorfalls.chainsawsuit.com/ Even if you don’t plan to write for this fic. You’ll thank me later.  
  
-A Yuletide letter, October 2012

*

There were some strange detours, too. Yuletide letters got Cath hooked on creepypasta. It was a lot like all those scary, “totally true” legends that got traded around on elementary school playgrounds; needles in candy, spiders in wigs, madmen attacking parked cards with metal spikes. Nowadays, the internet seemed to have taken these kinds of tales and transformed them into stories about haunted video games and eerie youtube videos.

In the end, Cath lost an entire day and night to reading creepypasta, pausing only when Reagan stopped by. 

“Okay, listen to this one,” Cath said, by way of greeting. 

“Oh boy.” Reagan said to no one in particular, setting Target bags down on her desk. 

Cath read the entirety of Candle Cove out loud, looking for any hint of fascination or horror on Reagan’s face. There was none to be found. 

“Isn’t that a great short story?” Cath had seen Reagan reading horror novels from time to time. This wasn’t that different, right?

“Well,” Reagan said. “It nails how people talk online I guess.” 

“People are requesting it for Yuletide.” 

“Like… as fanfic?”

“Yeah.”

“Fanfic for an internet urban legend.”

“It’s not an urban legend, it's creepypasta."

“Whatever. I’d be too intimidated to write anything based off that, personally.”

That admission was so startling that Cath slowly closed her laptop and stared at Reagan. “Why do you say that?” 

“Well, the horror in that story seems to be based on what _isn’t_ shown, you know? It would take a confident writer to think they could add to the story while still withholding information in a creepy way...” Reagan shook herself. “Sorry, I’ve had to do so many essays lately that I’m starting to talk like one.”

It wasn’t the first time Cath thought Reagan might make a great fic writer. It also wasn’t the first time Cath kept that thought to herself.

*

Dear Yulegoat, 

Hey there! First off, it’s really hard to squick me so I wouldn’t worry about that. If you’re really worried, you can have the mods reach out to me. Otherwise just write the story you want to write. 

**Fandom:** Mind Maze  
I can’t be the only one who remembers this game, right? It was this endless trivia game on the Encarta CD rom. You basically wandered around an eerie medieval castle, while people dressed in ren fair garb would ask you about Albert Einstein. The other day I was wondered what had happened to it. Turns out that Encylowikia basically put them out of business????  
Anyway, so yeah, I want fic set in this world. I have so many questions about this. Why are you answering questions that a medieval person wouldn’t know? Does the castle corrupt you?? IS THE CASTLE FLOATING AROUND SPACE TIME? I WANT ALL THE ANSWERS.  
-A Yuletide letter, October 2012  
*

Creepypasta was Cath’s Yuletide fling. But that one Mind Maze letter became Cath’s Yuletide obsession.

It shouldn’t have been. She barely remembered Mind Maze, herself. What she did remember was her dad and mom playing around with Encarta, their faces slightly blue in the light of the computer. And after her mom had left, her dad took to methodically playing Mind Maze a lot. He could go for hours because the game seemed to be endless. Cath would do her homework on the couch and watch as he went through screen after screen. Question after question. There were a lot of drawings of subtly sinister medieval people, and a lot of trivia questions about queens named Catherine. 

Eventually Cath started doing her homework in her bedroom. Cath told her dad it was because the music was annoying. In truth, she couldn’t stand the monotony of it all. 

When they got a sleek new computer, Encarta disappeared along with it. 

“Do you remember Mind Maze?” She asked her dad towards the end of a phone conversation. 

“Wow, I haven’t thought of that in years.”

“Me neither. People were just kind of reminiscing about it today.” Cath said. Technically it was even true. “Did you ever get to the end?”

“There was an _end?_ ”

Their conversation ended up taking several detours. Before Cath knew it they were hanging up on one another. 

But then her father called her back half an hour later. 

“Cath! I looked Mind Maze on YouTube. Found a lot of videos with very shouty guys playing their way through it. Why would you make people watch you play a video game?” 

“I dunno.” One of Levi’s roommates had a channel like that but she couldn’t say she’d ever watched it.

“Thankfully we have the mute button. And the ability to fast forward. So I saw the end of the game finally!”

“What happens?”

“They tell you that you lifted the curse and the castle is now yours! Did you know the castle was cursed?”

“How could it not be?” 

Still, this new information lent a foundation to the idea that floated around around in her mind. It was cross pollinated by her recent foray into creepypasta obsession. Cath wanted to write about a castle slipping through time, bearing witness to the entirety of the human experience. The “curse” was having more knowledge than anyone could stand (having gone through the experience of finals, Cath felt a deep kinship with this kind of struggle.)

Cath kept an eagle eye on the sign-up sheet. There were two requests for Mind Maze, and seven offers. One of them was hers. Every few hours she refreshed the letter submission post hoping to see the mysterious second request. It never seemed to materialize no matter how much she hoped.

She wondered if it was possible to edit her offers so that she would be guaranteed to receive the letter that sparked her imagination. However, when Cath logged back into ao3 she discovered that sign-ups had ended.

  
**Subject:** [AO3][Yuletide 2012] Your Assignment! 

Recipient: AgathaPenelope4Evaaaa 

Prompts  
1.  
**Fandom:** Romeo and Juliet – Shakespeare  
**Characters:** : Rosaline (Romeo and Juliet – Shakespeare)  
-Portion of an email sent to Cath Avery

*

Cath first noticed the Yuletide assignment while checking email on her phone. There were no prompts. There were no links to a letter. She told herself that her phone had just truncated the message and she would read the details later. Instead, she tried to identify her current emotion. It was neither excitement nor disappointment, but it wasn’t boredom either.

After meditating on it for a bit, she decided that the feeling was that of loss. A tiny sliver of loss. There had been a kind of frenetic excitement leading up to this email. A sense there were tons of possibilities, and a plethora of unknowns. 

Now an algorithm had put a stop to it. 

“There were almost 2,000 possibilities,” she explained to Wren during a phone call. “Now that’s all gone.”

“There weren’t 2,000 possibilities,” Wren pointed out. “You didn’t sign up for every fandom.”

“I think some people found a method of doing that.”

“But did you?”

“No.”

“Well there you go.” 

Cath turned on her computer and clicked over to her email. She clicked to her school’s Blackboard site, mostly in a fugue of disbelief. And then she clicked back to her email. 

“This person didn’t actually request any kind of plot. They don’t have a letter at all.”

“Wait, what were you assigned?”

“… Well, you know how they say Gemma Leslie is no Shakespeare?”

“Oh shit!”

*  
Hey! I feel like I’ve been spamming AO3 lately! But when I see Florence and the Machine lyrics **and** a request for Agatha/Penelope on a comment ficathon… what was I supposed to do? Hope you enjoy!  
-Author notes for ‘oh my love don’t forsake me (take what the water gave me),’ an Agatha/Penelope fic by AgathaPenelope4Evaaaa

*

Okay. Okay, okay, okay. Letters weren’t actually mandatory. At the very least, Cath had been given a great deal of leeway. That was good, right?

Cath ended up ransacking her recipient’s AO3 profile for scraps of information. Like Cath, she had written a great deal of Simon Snow fic. Unlike Cath, her recipient exclusively wrote Agatha/Penelope fanfic. She rarely set her stories in Watford. This writer favored AUs. She had the two girls falling in love in ancient Rome and medieval Britain. She had them falling in love at the North Pole and in coffee shops on Mars. 

AgathaPenelope4Evaaaa was effusive in author’s notes, and quite affable on her tumblr. Her fic was amazing. She posted strikingly good fanmixes to 8tracks, and seemed to leave nice comments everywhere. This seemed to be her first Yuletide, too. Cath developed a strange sense of protectiveness _very_ quickly for her recipient. 

Cath _would_ write the best damn Rosaline fic that she could. She wouldn’t let AgathaPenelope4Evaaaa be disappointed just because Cath had gotten a little too ambitious by offering _Shakespeare._

*

Hey Levi? My calls to Cath are going through to voicemail 

Pretty sure she’s in the library. The signal’s always bad there 

Oh, right 

Did you want me to check on her? 

Maaaaaaybe  
-Text messages between Wren Avery and Levi Stewart

*

Levi found Cath in the library, partially buried beneath books on the lives of nuns in the Italian city states.

“I know you don’t have any history courses this semester.”

Cath played with the cords on her hoodie. “Maybe this is some light reading.”

“Uh- _huh_.” Levi sat down next to her and thumbed through the pages of one particularly frayed tome. “I have a feeling you’re trying to be really historically accurate for this Romeo and Juliet fic, though.” 

She rubbed her eyes. For hours, now, her skull had been threatening to form a full on headache. “It’s Shakespeare. He's kind of a big deal.”

“Yeah, but remember that trivia night bar a few weeks ago?”

Cath felt her face go a little red. Of course she remembered that date. It had led to the first time she slept with Levi. “Yeah, I remember.”

“Remember how one of the questions was about how in one play Shakespeare said a landlocked country had a coast? If he didn’t have to be historically accurate you don’t have to be either.” 

If they weren’t in public- never mind that the library wasn’t a popular place on Friday night- she would have leaned her forehead onto his shoulder. “It still has to be _good_.”

“It will be. _You’re_ writing it.” 

Well then. 

Now Cath was full on blushing. 

They ended up borrowing a _Romeo and Juliet_ DVD from the library. The 1960s one that had partial nudity from Romeo. Back in 9th grade, her class had to get signed permission slips in order to watch it. 

“So who _is_ Rosaline?” Levi asked a few minutes after they pushed play. "I don't remember her."

Cath knew, from googling, that one particular extra was meant to represent the character. When Rosaline danced across the screen, Cath hit pause and pointed her out. 

“There, that’s her.” She pressed play again. 

As the contentious party gave way to the balcony scene, Levi started to nudge Cath. “When does Rosaline come back?”

“She doesn’t.” 

Cath braced herself, waiting for some sort of joke from Levi. Instead he considered the idea for a few seconds. 

“So Romeo was in love with her, she rejected him, and she gets to survive the play. She doesn't even see any of the killing.”

“Pretty much.”

“She dodged a bullet. Well, at least in that movie version that has all the guns.”

It’s an awful pun, but Cath finds herself laughing. 

As the tragedy plays out on screen, however, Cath’s mind is abuzz with fragile strands of plot. Wisps of ideas. Nothing strong enough to call a plot bunny, but intriguing all the same. Because Levi was right; Rosaline really _did_ dodge a bullet. She had avoided the families’ deadly feud. She was deciding a life for herself, insofar as she was able. But she would have known many of the play’s victims. She would have had to help pick up the pieces in Verona.

Rosaline had no lines. Like her onscreen counterpart she invited questions and possibilities. Like her onscreen counterpart she twirled away, just out of reach. The fic’s plot would come to Cath later. Probably closer to finals, when she should be writing literally anything else. In that chaotic time she would try to hold on to this moment. Rosaline might not have any lines, but she had a story hiding on the margins of the plot. 

Someone out there wanted to hear that story. And Cath knew she would be able to tell her version of it.

It wouldn't be Shakespeare but it would be something new.


End file.
